A Question of Holmes

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Canvas. It was a set. I was at the end of an unlit hallway that had been used to store the backdrops from productions past. Shaking my head at myself, I hefted my cloth bag over my shoulder and picked my way through the landscapes before me.

  A desert, lovingly rendered by someone who had never seen a desert, festooned with the required glimmering oasis in its distance. A Romanesque colonnade, the long rows of columns stretching out to disappear in a fountain. I ran my hand over its smooth surface. Wooden benches; a gilded throne on casters, paint chipping around the lions’ heads that made up its armrests; a streetlamp, patinated as though it had come straight out of Victorian London, leaning against a wall.

  This maze of places and props was so dense as to block out any light that might have leaked in around the door. But the path I was taking . . . I wasn’t the first one to do it. Someone had picked their way through here before.

  I took out my phone and switched on its flashlight, training it on the floor. Scuffed linoleum. No way to check for prints. But there—and there—and there. Petals. Dried up on the ground.

  Fallen from an orchid handled too roughly in the dark.

  Quickly, I stooped to take photographs, but I left the petals where they were. Tomorrow, if I was feeling particularly invincible, I would pass the photos on to Sadiq for her own purposes.

  With my phone out, I checked the time again. Half past five, and nothing frozen in my shopping bag. Since I’d made my way into the building, I decided to satisfy my curiosity about the lighting rig. I crept out slowly from behind the final backdrop (a confectioner’s shop, painted kindergarten-bright) and to the bottom of the stairs that led up to the stage.

  Voices up above. Quiet ones. Assured. A team from the Thames Valley Police, perhaps, collecting evidence. But as I turned to go, I heard a man’s frustrated exclamation, a foot slammed hollowly against the stage’s sprung floor. I eased my bag onto the floor, then slipped up the dark stairs and backstage, taking care to keep out of the light.

  A blond boy, tall and broad-shouldered, his arms crossed as though he was hugging himself. Theo, his face a mask for all it showed, and across from him, a man with his back to me. Graying hair, expensive shoes, trousers tailored far more fashionably than I’d have expected for a man of his age.

  When he spoke, he spoke the queen’s English. An accent native to nowhere. It had to be bred into you. “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “In your position, it’s poor form to keep someone waiting, especially when you demanded to meet them.”

  “You didn’t say you’d be getting in so early,” Theo protested, and something—the note of fear, his half step backward—urged me to take out my phone to film the rest of what I saw. “Besides, I had to talk my way past the officer out front, and that took forever.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Theo lifted his chin. “That I’m directing the production of Hamlet that’s going up next month, and that I had to meet my costume designer inside. What did you tell him?”

  “Does it matter?” The man scoffed. “The school won’t allow you to run this production.”

  They were speaking very quietly, but the acoustics caught their words and carried them into the corners of the building. Beyond them, in the auditorium, the seats unrolled up and out into the shadows.

  “I talked to Quigley today. They canceled the production this morning. But I told him I’d do it myself. Without their help. And he told me—and I quote—‘Do what you want, it’s your funeral,’” Theo said. “Mature of him, huh? And I can’t get anyone else to answer my emails. They’re all too concerned with saving their own necks to lift a finger for us. But I can’t waste this summer. I can’t.”

  “From what I understand,” the man said coldly, “you’ll be at conservatory this fall. Why does this matter?”

  Theo stared him down, his brow hardening. I remembered his easy grace during his audition, the force of his presence. I could see him bringing those things to bear now.

  “You’ve never understood,” Theo said. “You’ve never understood. Matilda told me that about you, you know that? You make this big deal about being this insider, this true artist, but the work you’ve done was never onstage. You never breathed it the way we did. You never really understood the alchemy of it. Your blood turning to something better, right there on that stage. We make our art from ourselves. We’re the musician and the instrument—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, do I have to listen to this pretentious nonsense—”

  “Yes,” Theo said, his voice breaking. “Yeah, you do. Because I got a call last Christmas from my girlfriend. My ex-girlfriend, I guess I should say, because she broke up with me the night before she ‘disappeared’—”

  “How is that any of my business?”

  “—because she insisted that I knew why people were being hurt. Why did she think that? Fuck if I know—not like I could ask her, because again. She disappeared. Until Christmas day, when I got a call from Matilda’s cell. I picked it up, and I just heard her breathing—”

  “What a sad fantasy,” he said.

  “—until she said my name. She said it twice—Theo, Theo—and then help. And then it sounded like the phone was being wrestled away from her. The line went dead.” Theo stared at the man, anguished. “How can I say this and have you not care? She could be chained up in some pervert’s basement! She could be anywhere, horrible things could be happening to her, and you don’t care—”

  As he’d been talking, the man had begun to pace a tight, controlled path, back and forth in front of Theo like a tiger. And at that, he exploded. “You don’t know a thing about this, boy. You’re just some American piece of trash she picked up last summer! Our daughter, always hauling home the charity cases, I was used to that. But never someone like you. Do you know what she told me, so defiantly, before we came out to see her show last summer? ‘You’re going to meet Theo, my boyfriend, he’s bisexual.’ So smug, as though she’d invented acting out to get your parents’ attention. I don’t care what you do in bed, that’s none of my business, but I told Matilda, he’ll do that nowhere near my daughter—”

  Theo had gone entirely white. In my hiding spot, I felt my hands begin to shake. I knew, intellectually, this kind of prejudice existed; I had seen it spewed about online, in the news, seen it bandied about like it was divine will to discriminate.

  I had never seen it delivered at such close distance, with such personal hatred. I thought of my uncle Leander, and my hands tightened on my phone.

  “—and so when she disappeared, I knew why. Because of you. Because of what you did to her, you—” He cut himself off with a curse.

  “What did I do?” Theo said. It was almost a howl. “What the hell did I do?”

  “We knew enough to tell Matilda that she was headed down a dark path,” Wilkes said. “And she decided to run rather than stay with you. So there’s your mystery solved. Are we finished now?”

  “You’re a bigot,” Theo said, with a hard-fought calm that I admired. “And you would rather imagine that I had something to do with her disappearance than take this gigantic lead I’m handing you. I don’t trust the police. They want to pin me down for this. But I thought I could trust you.”

  “You imagined that phone call,” George Wilkes said stoutly. “You’re a selfish little boy, trying to make this all about you. My daughter is missing, and you’re making light of it for your own perverted purposes.”

  At the top of the stage, a door opened. I wanted badly to lean out to look, but I stayed where I was.

  “Imagined it? I . . .” Theo dragged his hands through his hair. “What are you not telling me?”

  “It sounds like,” a voice said, carrying down from the back of the auditorium, “the two of you are done discussing school business, or whatever it was you said you were doing. Both of you. Out. I don’t want to ask twice.”

  “Yes, Officer,” Theo said, and with a final loaded glance at George Wilkes, he hopped off the stage. I ended the video
and shrank back farther into the darkness of the wings, and not a moment too soon—George Wilkes cast one final, dismissive look around him before he passed out of my sight.

  And as for Theo?

  I was hard-pressed to see him as the guilty party, anymore.

  I WAITED TEN SILENT MINUTES BEFORE I PADDED BACK down the backstage stairs into the bowels of the theater. After I’d made it out the utility door, I trotted out to the high road, my shopping bag over my arm. A girl on her way home to make dinner, nothing more.

  Once I was safely in my flat, I texted DI Sadiq the video. Then asked, what is George Wilkes’s profession?

  Theatrical costuming, Sadiq had said. Will review this before tomorrow. Thanks.

  I thought, again, of Anwen’s cabinet of curiosities, of Theo texting her last Boxing Day to demand what she knew. I thought of George Wilkes’s fury at his helpless daughter. I thought of the stage light falling out of the sky like a bomb, and then I cleared the kitchen counter and laid out an elaborate cheese plate, because I was an adult, or at least, I was pretending to be.

  Eighteen

  I SENT WATSON TEN QUID FOR A CAB, AND THE VIDEO I’D taken in the theater. Watch on your way over, I said. I want your opinion.

  I live to do your bidding, he responded.

  Thanks, I said. Pumpkin.

  It was a twenty-minute walk from the station to my door, and my aunt had always believed in a “constitutional” after train travel of any length, which meant that she would arrive, with military precision, at two minutes past seven.

  And she did. When she let herself up into the building, I was waiting at the door to our flat to take her jacket.

  In appearance, the Holmeses fell into one of two camps: those with a severe, clean-lined beauty, and those who looked like badly boiled eggs. In her youth, Araminta had been the former. I had seen pictures of her when she’d worked as a codebreaker for the Home Office: a tumble of black curls, her eyes glittering like jeweled knives. But in recent years, her face had begun to give way to gravity (we all do, in the end), and now the long bags underneath her eyes made her look startlingly like my great-aunt Mildred. She was slim, in sensible shoes with a sensible suitcase, but despite her neatness, she looked years older than the last time I’d seen her.

  Though, when I thought about it, it had in fact been . . . years.

  “Lottie,” she said, wheeling her suitcase smartly against the wall. “Let me have a look at you.”

  I stepped forward to present myself. (A small, horrified part of me wondered if this had been what I’d done this morning to Watson—presented myself for inspection, as I’d learned growing up.) For a long moment, she studied me with those cut-glass eyes she’d had as a girl.

  “You had a party last night,” she said.

  “Of sorts.” I’d known there was no point in cleaning up. “You’re not going to make me work out how you knew, are you?”

  Araminta snorted. “I’m not your father.”

  “Thank God for small mercies.”

  “And this—” She swept past me into the flat, and I could hear her judgment as she looked it over. Its overstuffed chairs and bookshelves, its bright throw blankets, its television. “This is quite nice, actually.”

  I blinked. “I think so,” I said cautiously.

  “You seem happy,” she said over her shoulder, as she floated into the kitchen like the indefatigable ship she was. “Your boyfriend—James—he stays over most nights?”

  I followed behind her, trying not to stomp my feet. “Jamie. Watson, rather. And only since Leander’s been out of town.”

  Watson, in his previous accounts of our “adventures,” has spoken of the frustration inherent in holding a conversation with someone (ostensibly me) who knows all your secrets at a glance (I don’t—well, not always). He’d said once it was like playing chess one-handed. I disagree. I can play chess perfectly well one-handed. Conversing with my aunt Araminta was, at times, like playing speed chess with both hands tied behind your back while someone screamed obscenities into your ear.

  “Uncle Leander,” Araminta said, sitting down at the counter. She eyed the spread I’d laid out, then picked up a cheese knife. “Honorifics, Lottie, are never wasted words.”

  “Yes, Aunt.”

  She arranged herself a plate of Brie and grapes and water crackers, then, to my surprise, passed it to me. “Eat,” she said. “You’re still underfed for your frame. Though, thank God, nothing like the last time I saw you.”

  I took the plate.

  “Eat,” she said again, and, obligingly, I put a thumb’s worth of Brie in my mouth and chewed.

  “Good girl,” she said, then watched my throat until I swallowed. “I could murder your father.”

  Before I could say anything to that—could I, in fact, say anything to that?—she had moved on. “Did you learn to do this from films?”

  “Lay out a spread?” I asked. “I—”

  “Films,” she said, “or your housekeeper, or Leander. Uncle Leander. It’s one of the three. Most likely Leander. Though I shouldn’t count out your Jamie.”

  “Jamie doesn’t know how to make a stir-fry,” I told her, and then reeled at having sold him out so easily.

  “He doesn’t,” she said, with delighted interest. I watched her file that away. “Fascinating. We should teach him. Eat, Charlotte.”

  I put a grape in my mouth. She squinted at me. I put in two more. “Also,” I said, mouth full, “I don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said. “You know how to slit a man’s throat and how to get Lucien Moriarty extradited back to Britain, but you don’t know how to make a stir-fry.”

  I nodded.

  “I could kill your father,” she said, “kill him,” and at that, Watson rapped on the door.

  In short order she had the three of us on the sofa, though Watson tucked himself behind me in case Araminta should want to bite him. I didn’t blame him—I had a number of family members who were, in point of fact, vipers—but he shouldn’t have worried. The two of them got on famously.

  There aren’t very many stories about my aunt. The one that’s told over and over in my family is perhaps the most dramatic—her uncovering Walter Moriarty’s dastardly plot; his killing her cats in revenge—and it is also, perhaps, the only story about her they know. When Araminta quit her job at the Home Office to keep bees in Sherlock Holmes’s little cottage, my family had assumed that she had quit them as well.

  That she had quit the world entirely. Shriveled up like some old crone.

  That night, I remembered that other people can’t tell your story for you. And also that my aunt had a book club.

  “I think you met my mother at a charity auction,” Watson was saying, “a long time ago?”

  “Oh, yes,” Araminta said. “Grace is lovely. Very strong, very intelligent. I know you’re worried about her after that Lucien business—”

  Watson winced. It was a rather euphemistic way to say “a Moriarty married your mother.”

  “—but give her time, and she’ll come out of it unscarred. I know you’re worried that she blames you for it. She did warn you to never get involved with our family, didn’t she?” Her eyes flitted between us. “It wasn’t bad advice. But really, she doesn’t blame you.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, but how—”

  “She blames your father,” Araminta said succinctly, and ate another grape.

  Behind me, Watson coughed. “How exactly do you know that?” he asked, a bit strangled. “Did I say—or do—could you tell from my shoes, or—”

  Her mouth twitched, and then she burst into a hearty laugh. “Oh, you poor boy. You’ve been running around with Lottie for far too long. I talk to your mother maybe once a month.”

  “Oh,” Watson said, and I leaned back and squeezed his knee.

  “Don’t be disappointed. You don’t actually want someone to read your whole history from your body. Can you imagine what I’d be able to tell a
bout what you’ve done the past few days?”

  Watson’s eyes flickered to my bedroom door and back again.

  “Dear God,” she said, “now I know. An idiot would know. Never mind that. Have some more cheese.” She pushed the cutting board toward him. “The Mimolette is very good. Lottie, did you get it at a cheesemonger?”

  “Sainsbury’s,” I said, as behind me, Watson did his level best to disappear into the ground.

  She huffed. “Well. It’s very good Mimolette. Jamie. Eat.”

  “Has Charlotte told you about our case?” Watson asked, in an admirable attempt to change the subject. He was piling up a plate. “It’s Hamlet. Hamlet-adjacent, I guess I should say. It looks like there won’t be a production after all.”

  “No,” she said. “she hasn’t. Though it’s getting rather late, don’t you think?”

  “Late?” Watson paused. “It’s half past seven—”

  “But you haven’t eaten,” she said, heaving herself off the couch.

  He and I glanced down at our heaping plates. “No,” Watson ventured. “I suppose we haven’t.”

  “You can tell me in the car,” she said, gesturing us toward the door. “Your uncle does have a car, doesn’t he, Lottie?”

  He did, a little brown Fiat with a backseat sized for toddlers or mice, and it was there that I found myself squished in as we drove. We could have walked quite easily to most of Oxford, or taken a bus, and so in a way I wasn’t surprised as she drove us out of the city and west, into the gathering night.

  In the front, my aunt kept up a lively conversation with Watson, though perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an interrogation. I hoped he didn’t take it personally. She took pleasure, it seemed, in asking you a question, then answering it herself. Did Watson have any siblings (oh, you do, how could I have forgotten) and how was Shelby doing this summer, would she come visit, did she keep in touch with Leander after he helped to free her from that horrible American school?